A case study on how to quickly collect documents and reduce the volume for review using technology.
Problem
A law firm needed to collect documents from their client. After several weeks the legal team were struggling to engage their client and their IT team in the collection process.
eDiscovery Collab simplified the process for the client by identifying only the relevant documents for the lawyers.
Working Directly with the Lawyer’s Client
To collect the documents as quickly and with as little disruption to the client as possible, an eDiscovery Collab consultant was engaged and worked directly with the client’s business to carry out the collection.
To minimise disruption to the client, all emails of the relevant individuals and documents on the network drives of the company were collected.
In total, 296,664 documents were collected by eDiscovery Collab and ingested into the litigation database.
It was critical to reduce the size of this dataset before any review was conducted by the legal team. eDiscovery Collab used technology to reduce the data set.
Deduplication reduced the document set by 108,017 documents.
By running searches across the data based on the individuals and keywords, eDiscovery Collab found the relevant documents for review.
172,381 documents did not meet the search criteria, leaving 16,266 documents for review by the legal team.
The relevant documents were arranged chronologically by individual and search terms for review by the legal team.
The documents excluded by the search parameters were removed from the litigation database. The client only paid data hosting for the documents identified for review.
Benefits of Approach
Even though this approach involved an initial over-collection, a manageable document set for review was achieved with a targeted approach to the reduction of that data set.
The reluctance of the client and their IT team to engage in the collection exercise at the outset was successfully overcome by using technology after collection to whittle the document set down.
eDiscovery Collab substantially reduced the number of documents after deduplication for review from 172,381 to 16,266 therefore reducing the cost of legal review.
To avoid overpaying for hosting costs in the long term, this approach requires careful management by an experienced eDiscovery expert.